74 some of our emotions are moved, often pow- erfully. And yet in a sense her novels aren't interesting. This is the paradox of her work, part of the risk of setting a goal in fiction, of having an idea about it, an abstract idea. Always, with Hardwick, the human impulse in writing outweighs the ab- stract. No other critic writing about Syl- via Plath has so well captured Plath's deracination: "Her lack of conventional sentiment, her destructive contempt for her family, the failings in her marriage, the drifting, rootless rage, the peculiar homelessness, the fascination with sensa- tion and the drug of death, the determi- nation to try everything, knowing it would not really stop the suffering-no one went as far as she did in this." Beginning in the nineteen-sixties, Hardwick taught creative writing, first at Barnard College and then also at Co- lumbia, where she became an almost cultlike figure. "We wanted to know how she lived, what she ate, and what she did when she wasn't with us," recalls the nov- elist Sigrid Nuñez, who took Hardwick's graduate-level fiction workshop. Hard- wick's former students, who also include the novelists Mary Gordon, Nancy Le- mann, and Susan Minot, recall that she was not prone to coddling. Minot says, "I remember once she began a discussion in class by reading the first sentence of someone's story in that kind of trembling voice of hers, and saying, 'It's like the curtain rising on an unpromising play:' " Hardwick enjoyed teaching; she finds it annoying that so many writers com- plain about their teaching responsibili- ties. "There's nothing to it," she told me. "You just go in and do your rap. The thing you get bored with is that you have so few ideas." She also doesn't believe that universities have any business teach- ing contemporary fiction. When she was a graduate student at Columbia, she was reading Milton and the Romantic poets and "The Faerie <21teene"-books that she wouldn't necessarily have read on her own. "That's the joy of it, I think. That's the education. But why should you teach Toni Morrison? She's just out. If an En- glish major can't pick up a new novel. . ." She trailed oft: disapproving. I N 1979, Hardwick published what re- mains her most widely read book, the gorgeous "Sleepless Nights." In it, she explored a hybrid genre: fiction written in the form of a meditative essay. Hard- wick told me that she loved writing "Sleepless Nights" because it allowed her not only to fictionalize aspects of her own life but also to quote writers she loved and weave them into the fabric of her story. Elizabeth, the narrator, is a reader who has always been consumed by liter- ature. She says of her life, "It certainly hasn't the drama of: I saw the old, white- bearded frigate master on the dock and signed up for the journey: But after all, 'I' am a woman." What follows is a string of impressionistic reminiscences- of a gentlemanly pervert in Kentucky, a self-absorbed lover in New York, a for- midable washerwoman in Maine, a phi- landering doctor in Amsterdam. The primary relationship in the book is that of the protagonist to us, and yet Hardwick constructs the book so that Elizabeth nevertheless remains at a dis- tance, her irony intact. This is no "tell all"; she is merely lending herself to us for a while. At times, these intimate glimpses are almost unbearable as she flirts with the reader's curiosity; at the end of one chapter, she casually adds,"Goodbye? I have left out myabor- tion, left out running from the pale, frightened doctors and their sallow, furi- ous wives in the grimy, curtained offices on West End Avenue." Even so, the vo- luptuous shapes and textures of her sen- tences continue to seduce us. H ARDWICK retired from teaching in the mid-eighties, but she contin- ued to write, and her next collection of essays, "Bartleby in Manhattan" (1986), was as wide-ranging as "Seduction and Betrayal" had been focussed. It includes a 1965 piece on Selma, Alabama, in which she describes the ruined landscape of her youth: "What a sad countryside it is, the home of the pain of the Confed- eracy, the birthplace of the White Citi- zens Council. The khaki-colored earth, the tense air, the vanquished feeding on their permanent Civil War." She also an- alyzes'the provincial girl named Marina who eventually became the WIfe of Lee Harvey Oswald: History, or events, exposed her to us in a series of frames: first, shabby, reserved, a proletarian with a tooth missing in front; in the end, on the day the Report was made public, a "famous" person, with eyelids darkened over in "Cleopatra" fashion, hair teased high, the gap in the smile filled, a people's capitalist, a success. In [Oswald] she seems to have seen her chance to live in fact what she was in spirit. . . . And Ma- rina, modern girl, demanded her right to sexual satisfaction, we are told; it was what she had expected, like a washing machine. In the years following the publica- tion of "Bartleby," Hardwick became in- creasingly preoccupied with issues sur- rounding private and public life: she wrote about J.F.K.'s peccadilloes and O. J. Simpson's hubris; she became ad- dicted to Court TV In "Sight-Readings," literary and biographical questions are examined with equal relish. She is no less fascinated by the lives of others, and yet she has considerable reservations about the perils of attempting to com- mit them to paper. In her essay on Joan Givner's biography of Katherine Anne Porter, she writes, "Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed pic- ture puzzle with all the scramble turned into a blue eye, and the parts of the right leg fitted together." Hardwick goes on to refer to biography as "consistent fi tion," and laments the difficulties of disproving it: Our power of documentation has a mon- strous life of its own, a greater vivacity than any lived existence. It makes form out of particles and finds attitude in a remembered drunken remark as easily as in a long con- templation of experience-more easily, in fact. It creates out of paper a heavy, obdurate permanency. Threats to its permanency will come only by way of other bits of paper, a footnote coup d' état. U NTIL someone has the temerity to write a biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, we will have to rely on her work for its powerful evocation of the life of her mind, and on hearsay from friends and acquaintances for the details of the life itsel[ And until someone has the wit to compile an "Elizabeth Hard- wick Reader," we will have to rely on past issues of magazInes and periodicals and the largesse of secondhand bookstores. In a piece published in 1982, Hard- wick herself described perfectly the fate of the restless, contemporary essayist: "Essays lie all over the land, stored up like the unused wheat of a decade ago in the silos of old magazines and modest collec- tions. In the midst of this clumsy abun- dance, there are rare lovers of the form, the great lovers being some few who practice it as the romance this dedication can be." For Hardwick, one of the most imaginative and indefatigable lovers of the form, this romance has never ended. .